Adeon Hawkwood

No, however pets have a threat level of 3 compared to 2 for the MM so unless you grab aggro and then maintain it (generally with a combination of taunt and damage) your pets will tend to draw aggro from you.

So far the system seems to be oriented a lot more towards the casual team-lite crowd instead of the hardcore-min-maxed-team crowd. Admittedly the incarnate trials (I will not call them iTrials) might change that but even those seem to be more about coordination instead of having an uber build.

If it's the game I think it is then from what I've seen you'll find it considerably more team centric than even the CoX incarnate system.

The thing is, preventing inactive players from "occupying" a house is only necessary if the demand for houses outweighs the supply. With Instanced housing there is an effectively unlimited supply of houses for people to use*. As you say it makes sense to allow people to assign their house to a particular door in the game world but there is no reason not to allow multiple people to use the same door. If the housing is instanced all that happens is that you click on the door and get transported to your house. In the extremely rare event that two people select the same door and are in a position to enter either character's house (which would probably require them to be on the same team) or if a mission is assigned to the door of your house the game simply pops up a dialog box to allow you to select what to enter (similar to the SG group portal at the moment)

Greg's rational for having taxes on property makes a lot of sense in a situation where housing is a limited commodity. He also makes some decent arguments for why housing should be a limited commodity. The thing is, I don't believe that those arguments apply to City of Heroes. Here are my counter-points:

1. The Costume Creator. This is one of the major selling points of the game, unlike a lot of other MMOs your appearance and your ability are separated. As such people invest a lot of thought into their character's appearance and how it reflects their personality. Houses are, essentially, an extension of that and as such they should be readily available to anyone who wants to make the effort to set it up.

2. It doesn't make sense in context. Ultima Online was set in a medieval fantasy world. As such most buildings are rather small and there is a large quantity of undeveloped land for people to build houses on. City of Heroes is set in a modern metropolis and as such there is a distinct lack of land for people to build on but there are a lot of very large apartment buildings. Realistically most of our heroes who actually live in the city have a small apartment in one of those buildings. As such the most sensible way to implement housing is to have the house itself be instanced but allow the player to select a door in the city to be the "main entrance". Since most of the available doors are apartment buildings anyway it makes perfect sense for them to be shared.

3. Continuing a bit form number 2, in order to make houses sensible as a limited commodity they really need to have a real world presence that extends beyond "behind this door". With the current layout there isn't really any room for a significant number of "real world" houses. The devs would need to redesign specific zones (or introduce new ones) that were setup to accommodate this. They could do it but the houses would still end up in their own special area so you don't really get the social benefits of it.

Overall I think instanced housing makes a lot more sense and if done that way there is no need to take houses away from inactive players.


*Ok, they technically use up hard drive space, but even if the devs implement a house editor similar to the base editor the actual "cost" in terms of hard drive space should not be that excessive, hard drive space is pretty cheap these days.

As a sugesstion, you might want to try again later. I ran into a problem on one of my characters where I could not convert merits into an alignment merit. I had the inf and merits and had not done a conversion in about 4 days and yet the "create" button was grayed out. I wondered off and did something else for a bit and when I came back it worked fine so there might be an intermittent bug that stops you from doing crafting.

His word is his bond . More realistically this illustrates the general problem with the trade of virtual goods. In real life bonding* the practice relies on the fact that the entity providing the bond are themselves able to be held accountable in some manner (normally a legal contract that would be enforced by the courts if necessary). In this situation there is no entity that could bond Fulmens and itself be held accountable in the event that he forfeited his bond (ok, technically the devs could, but I doubt they will).

Although Fulmens' slightly whimsical thread title described himself as a bonded courier in effect he is really acting as an unlicensed Escrow agent.

*Is it bonding? It sounds like the verb form should be bonding.

EDIT: Just to clarify I have no doubt that Fulmens' would be perfectly honest when providing this service, I was just commenting on the fact that if he were dishonest there isn't really much people could do about it.

That strikes me as a poor method. At the very least it would be useful to have a "willing to lead" checkbox in the turnstile interface and prioritize selecting those people (for both raid and team leaders) who check it over those who don't. That at least slightly increases the chance few getting a raid leader who's content to be the leader.

Well it depends on whether they convert all Hamidon's to use the turnstile system or keep the existing public raid and have the private Hamidon as another option.

I tested on my Traps/AR defender and the initial hold had a 91.4% chance to hit against an even con enemy. So I was wrong, the accuracy enhancement I've got slotted in it does help the initial hold.

Reflecting on it further that does actually make sense. For MM pet powers there is an issue where if you slot a set IO in the pet then any powers that do not use the primary aspect of the set will not benefit from any of the enhancement values. In this case the reverse is applying. The hold does not benefit from accuracy enhancements but the enhancement being used is a hold enhancement so the accuracy boost does work.

I'll try and verify this later but to the best of my knowledge "sneaking in" extra slotting like that does not work with pet or pseudo-pet powers. If the pet's power does not accept the enhancement type then it will not inherit the enhancement values from the main power. I haven't tested with PGT specifically but I do know that MM pet powers work that way.

I'm pretty sure they are instanced. The way it's setup would make no sense if it was at all possible to have members of the same league end up in different zones or multiple leagues in the same zone.

Yes but that's the zone cap, Hamidon itself can be done with fewer. Given that I could easily see them making a new "private Hamidon" option where you get your own zone with a cap of 48 (since the team of team tech caps out at 48). People have been asking for it for ages so it makes a lot of sense to do if the new tech allows it.

Well he specified honorable combat which is definitely the Klingons. In the Mirror Universe you just have to kill them, for Klingons you have to kill them honorably.

I don't get it either. Personally I just take the first 7 people to respond and go for it. On the other hand, 2 of my 3 incarnates are Traps so I almost always have a guaranteed -regen debuffer on the team (I think you meant -regen and not -def since -def is almost useless against AVs).

Now, I will admit that I love support heavy teams but I don't go out of my way to look for them. That being said one advantage of being a team leader who prefers to play support-ish characters is that it means the team is already starting with one support character. I actually tend to play my Defender and Mastermind more than my Blaster because they act as a security blanket for me. I know with them that they can pump out enough buffs/debuffs that the team should be able to complete the TF even if everyone else decides to bring a non-support character, with my Blaster that's not guaranteed (I'm confident that all TFs can be done without support characters but it does require a higher level of play from the people involved).

This is pretty much my view. Some of my characters the whole well of furies/incarnate powers makes sense with the concept. In some cases it makes sense as a concept but the actual arc form Mender Ramiel does not fit. In some cases it makes no sense at all.

I can still use it to increase my power however since other than the introductory arc the actual boosts are completely abstract.

They tried to mention it, but the server exploded.

If you look at the wording a "League" is described as a "team of teams" so I suspect that only your personal team of 8 will fuel the Kheldian's buffs the other 5 teams will not.